Your Right to Know

AUSTIN, Texas — The Texas State Archives will display the bullet-riddled clothes worn by Texas
Gov. John Connally on the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated 50 years ago in
Dallas.

The white cotton shirt with faded bloodstains and a black business suit are the centerpiece of a
display in Austin, Texas, that starts Oct. 22 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy
assassination on Nov. 22, 1963. The exhibit will run through Feb. 14.

“I think it makes it real,” Sarah Norris, Texas State Library and Archives Commission
conservator, said of Connally’s clothing. “You can read about it and you can think about it, but to
actually be in the room with it certainly gives you pause.”

The open-topped limousine was driving through Dallas with Connally, then governor of Texas, and
his wife, Nellie, in the jump seat and Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, in the back seat when Lee
Harvey Oswald opened fire.

The Warren Commission, established to investigate the assassination, concluded that Connally was
hit by the same bullet that first hit Kennedy.

“There are bullet holes both in the back and the front of the suit jacket,” she said. “There is
one bullet hole in the wearer’s right cuff, and there is another in the left leg, on the
front."

John Anderson, preservation officer for the commission, is responsible for taking care of the
items of clothing. He said it was only by accident that the clothing survived that day.

“The governor was in extreme pain as they were trying to remove his trousers at the hospital,
and he said something to the effect of ‘just cut the damn things off,’ but then he lost
consciousness,” he said.

Connally donated the shirt, suit and striped tie he was wearing to the state archives while he
was still hospitalized.